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EFFIGIES and MARKERS

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

On Sept. 21, I interviewed with a reporter from The Arizona Republic newspaper, which is carried online as AZcentral. This is the article that was published on Sept. 25 (that I only found today, Sept. 30).

When I was in high school, I was a teen correspondent for The Arizona Republic and its afternoon sister, The Phoenix Gazette, and wrote numerous articles about my school and classmates. During college, I sold a feature article to their Sunday magazine.

Friday, September 25, 2015

I’ve noticed that when Americans and Canadians travel to the countries where
most of their ancestors lived, we try to express the gut feeling of when we set
foot there for the first time. We may be out on the airport tarmac sniffing
jet exhaust, or riding an air-conditioned tour bus across the countryside, stepping out of a car and catching the scent of flowers and mowed hay, or
standing on the deck of a ferry in the Irish Sea,
but we smell “home.” We feel “home.” It’s a visceral tie to the land.

We may have read classic literature, mined the internet, or seen films and
documentaries of the place, and dreamed of visiting there. But when we
actually arrive, it’s a feeling that’s difficult to describe: peace,
adventure, accelerated heartbeat, some psychic feeling that you
are where you belong, or that you’re grafted back into the vine.

Maybe it’s a psychological reaction. Maybe it’s biological.
Maybe it’s just a dream coming true. Maybe it’s an inherited memory, which
scientists are saying can happen because our ancestors had a traumatizing event that changed their DNA.

"Cooks have another word for it.
"Terroir" is what makes a
loaf of sourdough from San Francisco taste so
different from its cousin in Bordeaux.
The regional microbes, in the soil and air, impart their particular notes to
the bread. You can taste terroir in
your wine, your cheese, and even your chocolate -- all of which are produced
with the help of specialized bacteria [Mycobacterium vaccae]that can vary from town to town." http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/how-to-get-high-on-soil/251935/

It’s not about real estate, or a pin on a Google or
TripAdvisor map. What we feel is something that doesn’t change because of an
earth mover cutting down a hill, or a nuclear power plant taking over the farms
where our ancestors grew wheat or apples. When we stand on the grassy floor
of a ruined abbey or the tiled floor of an 800-year-old cathedral, we feel that
connection to the place, a reconciliation of the moment we were ripped away from
our roots.

Tintagel, Cornwall

When we stand at the tomb of someone from our past, we
realize that there was life here once, and there is again, in us. Here lived Love,
Joy, Grief, Fear, Faith.

Ancient languages like Hebrew are rich in visual images. Wrapped in the word shalom are meanings of peace, hello, goodbye, well-being, surely goodness and love (Psalm 23:6), wholeness, completeness, welfare, prosperity, and the deeply satisfied sigh, "Aaaagh." (Learned that from a rabbi!)

And the magical feeling that we’ve come back to another home, a place
where we truly belong. Go back to your roots, maybe for the first time.

Effigy Hunter will help fill in the gaps in your genealogical pedigree, as to where your medieval ancestors were buried, and if an effigy or brass still exists. It's also essential as an adventure travel guide when planning your trip to UK or Europe, because it shows both famous abbeys and churches, and small churches or ruins off the beaten path. Nine hundred names are charted in the book, and there are about 60 photos.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

On this date 395 years ago, September 16, 1620, the ship Mayflower
departed Plymouth, England for the New World, carrying 102 passengers.
Two months earlier, the Speedwell had left Leiden, where the English separatists had lived for more than 10 years. The send-off letter was written by my 9th-great-grandfather, Rev. John
Robinson, their minister. He stayed in Leiden, Netherlands, where he
died in 1625 at age 49. Considering how extreme the Calvinist Puritan
practices became in the next decades, it's amazing to see how
reasonable, practical, loving, and outright kind he was.

Part of his letter-sermon said that they must make every effort to be at peace with all men. This wasn't only about being at peace with God and themselves, nor was it sufficient to keep from being offensive to others, or to be careless in word or deed and then expect others to be gracious and forgiving. ("Chill! I was only joking! Can't you take a joke?") Rather, he says, think about the "strangers" among them --the people joining the expedition who were not part of their shared Christian fellowship in England and the Netherlands-- and remember to witness to them by "brotherly forbearance" and graciousness. In other words, show your Christianity by living it, not preaching it.

John Robinson's words:

Now,
next after this heavenly peace with God and our own consciences, we are
carefully to provide for peace with all men what in us lieth, especially
with our associates. And for that, watchfulness must be had that we neither
at all in ourselves do give, no, nor easily take offense being given by
others. Woe be unto the world for offenses, for though it be necessary
(considering the malice of Satan and man's corruption) that offenses come,
yet woe unto the man, or woman either, by whom the offense cometh, saith
Christ, Matthew 18:7. And if offenses in the unseasonable use of things,
in themselves indifferent, be more to the feared than death itself (as
the Apostle teacheth, 1 Corinthians 9:15) how much more in things simply
evil, in which neither honor of God nor love of man is thought worthy
to be regarded. Neither yet is it sufficient that we keep ourselves by
the grace of God from giving offense, except withal we be armed against
the taking of them when they be given by others. For how unperfect and
lame is the work of grace in that person who wants charity to cover a
multitude of offenses, as the Scriptures speak!But
besides these, there are divers motives provoking you above others to
great care and conscience this way: As first, you are many of you strangers,
as to the persons so to the infirmities one of another, and so stand in
need of more watchfulness this way, lest when such things fall out in
men and women as you suspected not, you be inordinately affected with
them; which doth require at your hands much wisdom and charity for the
covering and preventing of incident offenses that way. And, lastly, your
intended course of civil community will minister continual occasion of
offense, and will be as fuel for that fire, except you diligently quench
it with brotherly forbearance.

Friday, August 14, 2015

There’s nothing like it. It’s nonfiction medieval history, genealogy, monument photography, travelogue, a bucket list of where to go on your effigy hunt, anecdotes about the people behind—or under—the effigies, and a lesson in religious symbols and what they meant to the people who made them. This book contains 60 original images, and tables with more than 900 medieval names and burial places in Great Britain and Europe. Many of the subjects were royals or aristocrats, and others were famous or forgotten—until now. If you’re interested in ancestry research, this book is indispensable: chances are great that you share many of these ancestors with millions of people living today.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

As a writer, editor, blogger, and book author, I'd like to flatter myself that people visit my blogs to read my golden prose. [Insert angel choir here.] Blog stats tell a different story than what my ego would like: people find my photos in image searches and come to my stories. They download my photos and without so much as a bye-bye, they're gone, to post in their own pedigrees or blogs. That's why I've been keeping this project secret until now.

In September 2015, I'll release my latest book,

EFFIGY HUNTER

It will be available in paperback (I haven't yet decided about Kindle), with about 60 high-resolution grayscale images, and more importantly, tables of more than 900 names and burial places of your and my medieval ancestors, plus historical sketches about some of them--all in about 200 pages.

Is this book a travelogue? A bucket
list of where to go if you’re an effigy hunter? An aid to genealogy research? A
nonfiction history of human beings whose lives are mostly forgotten now? A
lesson in religious symbols and what they meant to the people who made them? The
fruit of decades of research and the desire to chart it so there could be a
simple way to unravel and understand the mysteries of five hundred to twelve
hundred years ago?

Yes.

Is this book morbid, scary, or
depressing, listing (as it does) burial places for so many people who have gone
before us?

No.

Some of the anecdotes are humorous,
and when I was doing the research, I was surprised many times at the
absurdities and coincidences I found.

There are 60 images and more
than 900 names in the charts of this book, and references to hundreds more in
places like Westminster Abbey and St. Denis, which are royal mausoleums. I
found the burial places in genealogy records, history books, guidebooks at the
churches, online articles, and by personal visits to many of the places you’ll
find in this book. I collected the images, most of which came from my camera,
on several educational, vacation, and business trips to the UK and Europe.
The historical information came from site visits, books (some of them digitized
from 19th-century histories), and websites.

A few of the articles were edited from my research
blog, Rooting for Ancestors, where
readers have expressed their appreciation for the images and informal,
conversational writing style, and for the subjects I’ve raised. Some of the subjects may be obscure, but those were the
articles that received the most interested and informed comments.

“History
is best understood by walking the ground where it happened,” said documentary filmmaker Ken
Burns. “You feel the presence of what went on before. We go to these places
because we're aware that the ghosts and echoes of an almost inexpressibly wise
past summon us.”

I hope you’ll find this book entertaining and
enlightening, and that it will inspire you to not only take a virtual tour
through its pages, but save your shekels for your own effigy hunts. There are
hundreds, maybe thousands, more effigies and burials to be discovered or
identified. As extensive as my research is, it’s a fraction of what’s left to
be hunted and photographed.

Remember, it’s not about the blank stare of the
700-year-old marble effigy—it’s the reminder of the person it represents. Go
on, I dare you: learn who they were. And remember.

Joan (Siwan) Plantagenet, 1191-1237, Lady of Wales,
consort of Llywelyn the Great, Prince of Wales.
She was buried at Llanfaes, but her empty tomb is at
Beaumaris parish church.

The English counties are listed in alphabetical order. If
there is an anecdote, commentary, or image, it will accompany the chart.

You can help spread the buzz by commenting below and sharing this article in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social media. In fact, here's a short URL for your convenience: bit.ly/1T8lROy

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Medieval and Tudor-era women, unless they're royal or
aristocratic (and even then...), are often forgotten when it comes to a surname
or history, or where they were buried.

The Eyres/Ayers of Wiltshire were no exception. Generations
of Eyres lived in the villages of Urchfont and Wedhampton, Wiltshire, only a
mile apart. Urchfont has a lovely church, St. Michael and All Angels, but I
can't find record of the Eyres being buried in it (though some of them must
certainly lie under the floor slabs). I visited the church in 2006.

Records on the Eyres go back to 1221, when Humphrey LeHeyr was born--a good 30
years after he supposedly accompanied Richard I the Lionheart on Crusade. (Seriously,
people really need to look at some timelines before they write that
stuff!)

Urchfont and Wedhampton lie on the Salisbury Plain near
Devizes, north of Sarum and Salisbury, and not far from the prehistoric sites
of Woodhenge, Stonehenge, West Kennet Long Barrow, and Silbury Hill.

There was a church at Urchfont from 900AD, the time of King
Alfred and his Queen Aelswith, but the present building began early in the
reign of King Henry III, about 1220. The tower was built in the latter 1400s,
within the lifetime of Juliana Cockerel Eyre.

After Humphrey LeHeyr, we have this succession of
descendants:

Galfridus LeHeyr, b. 1250 in
Wiltshire

Galfridus LeHeyr, b. 1285 in
Wiltshire

John le Eyre, b. 1325 in
Wedhampton who married Eleanor
Crooke, heiress of Urchfont

Simon Eyre, b. 1364 who may or may
not be the same man who was Mayor of London and founded Leadenhall Market.

Thomas Eyre, b. 1399

William Eyre, b. 1444 in
Wedhampton who married Juliana/Johana
Cockerel, b. 1444.

William and Juliana had two sons, one of whom is my
ancestor, John Eyre. Juliana, as far as I know, was not nobly born or notorious for her words or deeds; she was a wife and mother from Wedhampton, Wiltshire.

The other son was nameless, and isn't mentioned in
genealogy records, so I and probably many others assumed he died young,
forgotten, with no heirs.

But I found the other
son, and it explains why, of all the Eyres, only Juliana Cockerel Eyre was
buried in Christchurch Priory, 49 miles due south, on the chalk-cliffs coast of
England. Their other son was named William after his father, and he was a man
of the Church. William was born in 1478, and he was firstborn.That sets up the questions for which we have no answer:

Why the firstborn son instead of the younger son? Usually, the firstborn would inherit a double portion of the parents' estate, and a subsequent son would enter the military or monastic life.

Was William a promising scholar who would benefit with a Church education?

Was he gay (closeted, of course) and not likely to produce an heir for the Eyre line? His brother John is the ancestor of countless thousands in UK and America.

Did William's father do something wrong and feel the need to sacrifice his firstborn son to monasticism of the Church, and be a link to prayers for the parents for a lifetime? When a child or young person, male or female, was dedicated to the Catholic Church, they usually came with a dowry or large gift to benefit the monastery or nunnery. The larger the gift, the larger the chance the child would be destined to be an administrator with power: an abbot or prior, an abbess or Mother Superior, or perhaps a bishop.

When googling Eyre and Christchurch,
attempting to discover the location, and even better, an image, of Juliana's
tomb or slab, I saw a link to an
archaeological/historical description of the fabric of Christchurch Priory. And
there I found a William Eyre, sub-prior and then prior of the priory (a
monastic community), at exactly the right time. During his tenure as prior,
1502-1520, William Eyre was responsible for the rebuilding program of the
quire/choir section of the huge church. The former choir had been destroyed in 1420, when the central tower of the church fell down or was taken down. So the new Great Choir, where the monks performed their worship at the daily appointed times, was a welcome addition. This choir still stands today!

The web page, transcribed from an old book, says

In addition to the monuments
already noted there are a good many floor slabs with incised inscriptions,
originally filled in with black composition. The oldest of these are in Gothic
capitals, and there is such a strong resemblance between a number of them in
treatment and in the peculiar form of the inscription as to make it probable
that they belong to one date, although commemorating persons of different
periods. Several of them belong to priors of the house, others to lay persons.
The best preserved inscriptions run thus:—

Because the book didn't provide a translation of the Latin, I translated William's inscription several times using
Google Translate, which returned variants, which I averaged.
Five-hundred-year-old vernacular Latin wording won't be much like a modern computer
translation, nor classical Latin.

Juliana lived long enough to see her son elected prior,
which must have made her extremely proud. Does her inscription "of which
may God bless his soul" mean
that Prior William desired her prayers for him, from her place in heaven? Or
does it mean that once she went to heaven, her soul became male? That was the
belief of some people at the time.

I had already combed through the Christchurch Priory website
to find their virtual tours, and found 360-degree still pictures of the Great Choir
and the choir aisles (hallways around the outside of the choir). There are
floor burial slabs in both north and south aisles. Juliana and her son the
prior (who died 17 years after she did) would have been buried in the floor of
one of those choir aisles.

In medieval terms, it was a prime burial spot because your
grave would be close to all masses said in the chancel, and close to any saint
relics the church might have. If you gave property to the church, or your
surviving family did, the prayers and masses said, and candles lit, might help
your soul out of purgatory sooner. The monks or priests frequently saw your
tomb, effigy, brass, or slab, and remembered to pray for your soul.

"One thing have I
desired of the Lord, which I will require; even that I may dwell in the house
of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and
to visit his temple."

And look: here we are, 500 years later, thinking about
Juliana Cockerel Eyre. If you're her descendant, why not light a candle wherever you are, and say
a prayer.

"I AM the
resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he
were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall
never die."

The Christchurch nave, looking east to the stone choir screen behind which lies the Great Choir built by Prior William Eyre. He died in 1520, nineteen years before the Dissolution. Henry VIII had the monastery torn down, but the church was allowed to stand as a parish church. It's larger than 20 of England's cathedrals. One might suspect that the peopleof Christchurch paid a very large ransom to keep their churchfrom destruction.

Seventy-five years later, the Eyre descendants placed
alabaster memorials high on the south walls of St. Thomas Beckett
Church, almost in the
shadow of Salisbury Cathedral. By this time, they were prosperous merchants,
Members of Parliament, and Salisbury
mayors in the Elizabethan era, and they may have been Puritan, since the memorial
inscriptions say they “hated idolatry.” Several generations after that, a
branch moved to the oh-so-Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled near Salem
(where a descendant, Mary Ayer
Parker, was hanged as a witch in 1692), then moved south to New Jersey. From the Reformation in the
early 16th century, they were Protestant all the way: Anglican,
Puritan, Baptist, and Seventh Day Baptist.

Friday, January 16, 2015

If you’re
the slightest bit familiar with my blog, William and Mary Dyer, you
know that Mary Dyer laid down her life for the cause of religious liberty, or “liberty
of conscience,” as it was called. Her husband William Dyer, the first attorney
general in North America, was one of the founders of Portsmouth
and Newport, Rhode Island, which group stated, in
contrast with the other colonies’ theocracies, that they were a secular
democracy (religion and government were separated). William was active in the Rhode
Island legislature and was instrumental in the
groundbreaking 1663 charter of liberties granted by King Charles II, that
allowed the separation of church and state, and the freedom to do what the
conscience dictated in religious matters. That was the very beginning of the
human right that would be codified in the great First Amendment to the United
States Constitution, 130 years later.

The story of the three Baptists' persecution is told in the book, Mary Dyer Illuminated, available in paperback and Kindle. See this link for information on the five-star-reviewed book: http://bit.ly/RobinsonAuthor

I was
researching ancestors in New Jersey.
I knew that they had been Baptists living north of Salem, Massachusetts.
That area, the place where Massachusetts Gov. John Endecott lived, was
inhabited by the most extreme fundamentalist Puritans, who had tried to
suffocate some Quakers and tried to sell others into slavery. They’d imprisoned
and severely whipped Quakers, too.

But before
the Quakers, there were Baptists. In 1651, the good Christians of Massachusetts
imprisoned three Baptists from Newport who had gone up to Lynn (five miles
south of Salem) to administer Communion to an old, blind man, William Witter,
who had become a Baptist. After a trial, Dr. John Clarke was fined £20 (a huge
amount of money), Obadiah Holmes £30, and William Crandall £5. If they refused
to pay the fine, they would be whipped, a stripe for a pound. They refused to
pay. Clarke and Crandall were released on the way to their flogging because
sympathetic onlookers took up a collection and paid their exorbitant fines and hustled them away as they protested, but
Obadiah Holmes refused to allow a fine to be paid for him. He wanted the
vicious hatred of the persecutors to be shown to the Puritan colonists.

The scourge
had three branches of hard leather, so that the 30 strokes left 90
gashes—and hideous scars for a lifetime. It was laid on so hard that the people
begged the executioner to stop, worried that he’d kill Holmes. As his blood
sprayed, Holmes said, ‘Though my flesh should fail, yet God will not fail: so
it pleased the Lord to come in, and fill my heart and tongue as a vessel full,
and with audible voice I break forth, praying the Lord not to lay this sin to
their charge, and telling the people I found He did not fail me, and therefore
now I should trust Him forever who failed me not.’ Afterward, when the pain did
set in and he was recovering, Holmes insisted that his flogging felt like it
had been done with roses, and that he bore the marks of the Lord Jesus.

In 1651,
after John Clarke went to London to act as Rhode Island’s agent
(and procure a new charter for the colony), Holmes became the pastor of the
Newport Baptists.

***************

I had
families of Ayers, Bowens, and others who had emigrated from Wiltshire and
south Wales, to Salem and Ipswich,
presumably as Puritans during the Great Migration. One of the Ayers women had
a brother who was an officer at Mary Dyer’s execution in Boston.

But after
some time, they became Baptists (perhaps as a result of seeing persecution
unleashed on their neighbors), and moved temporarily to the Massachusetts-Rhode
Island border at Swansea, before leaving there in 1687 to found Bowentown, New
Jersey. They formed a Baptist church at Cohansey, and when a number of them,
including the Irish Baptist immigrant, John Swinney, became Sabbatarians in the 1710s, they
formed the Shiloh
Seventh Day
Baptist Church
a few miles away. One of their ministers, who seemed (according to my research)
to serve both the Saturday and Sunday churches, was a Welshman named Rev.
Nathaniel Jenkins.

St. Ursula's Church, Llangwyryfon, Cardiganshire, where Jenkins was baptized as an infant.

Nathaniel
Jenkins was born and baptized (meaning his parents were not Baptist because Baptists believed in the choice to be baptized
after the age of accountability) in Llangwyryfon, a tiny farming village near Aberystwyth, Wales.

He would
have become a Baptist as a child or young man and studied theology in Wales or England. And he would have been exceptionally bright, to be able to be sponsored for university fees--certainly parents in a tiny farm village (still tiny even to this day) would not have had the means.
He married Esther Jones,
and they had several children before emigrating to New Jersey in 1710. He served as a Baptist
minister in the First Baptist Church
for 18 years at the fishing and whaling community of Cape May, NJ.

During that
time, he served as a Trustee in the Loan Office and was elected as a member of
the colonial Council, which was equivalent to today’s state legislature. In
1721, a bill was introduced in the assembly,

"to punish such as denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the Divinity
of Christ and the Inspiration of the Scriptures."

(This appears to be
related to Baptist groups and the Unitarian movement in England, holding a doctrinal
conference called the Salter’s Hall Controversy in 1719.)

But
Nathaniel Jenkins, highly educated and respected Baptist minister that he was,
boldly spoke against the bill. The Welshman stood on the platform of "soul
liberty," which was another term for “liberty of conscience” or religious
liberty, granted to Rhode Island
in 1663 by King Charles II, after the work of Mary and William Dyer, Rev. Roger Williams, many who had been persecuted in Massachusetts, and (wait for it!) Rev. John Clarke and Obadiah Holmes (the Baptist who was
whipped). In fact, Obadiah Holmes’ son, by the
same name and also a Baptist minister, had moved from Newport to New Jersey and was well
known to the New Jersey Baptists.

In the
assembly, Nathaniel Jenkins declared that

“although I believe these doctrines as firmly as the
warmest advocate of the bill, yet I would never consent to oppose those who
rejected them with law or with any other weapon than argument.”

Jenkins said his theology actually was similar to the bill's sponsor, so it might have helped his town and congregation to outlaw dissenters like those in the Unitarian movement. But he recognized the injustice of enforcing religious thought and behavior through the government. Government-plus-religion always results in oppression.Whether it
was his reference to the religious liberty struggles in the American colonies, the
justice and logic of his statement, or his standing in the community, the bill was accordingly quashed. Voted down. Dead legislation. Not going to happen. Thanks to the testimony of the saints who'd gone before, and thanks to the principles of Nathaniel Jenkins.

Did I
mention I love history? Soul liberty
is in my blood!

During his
pastorate at Cape May, branches of the Baptist church were established at Salem,
Pittsgrove, and Great
Egg Harbor.Jenkins spoke at a number of Baptist churches in Pennsylvania
and New Jersey in the 1720s, and was called to Cohansey and
Shiloh on a permanent basis in 1728, and
remained their minister for 25 years.

One of his
sons was also named Nathaniel, and the son took over the pastorate of the Cape May church for a short time when his father was
called inland. But the son was an alcoholic, dismissed from the pulpit, and
died in his fifties.

The Bowens,
Swinneys, and Ayers families stayed in the same church for decades, and
siblings of one family married siblings of the other family, so
that my pedigree repeats itself a bit in the 1700s. There was no consanguinity,
however. The Swinneys moved west to Indiana and eventually Iowa. They remained Seventh-day Baptists for
200 years.

Rev.
Jenkins died August 2, 1764, in the 77th year of his age, still a minister, and
is buried in the Baptist graveyard at Cohansey, New Jersey. My parents visited the Cohansey and Shiloh locations in the spring of 1976, and made acquaintance with distant cousins who still lived there, still Seventh-day Baptists. Nathaniel Jenkins was my 6th-great-grandfather (9 generations).

People died in this country and elsewhere,
for the right to keep government separate from religion, and still allow the
freedom to worship God as you feel called. Don't trample their blood in your
eagerness to wave your Bible and feel patriotic and evangelical. I hope you use
the link at the top of the article to read about Mary Dyer and her death for
religious liberty.

History blogs you'll enjoy

About Me

Christy is an author and editor whose biographical novels and nonfiction book on William and Mary Dyer were published in 2013 and 2014. Her hardcover book "We Shall Be Changed" (2010 Review & Herald) is also available. In September 2015 she published "Effigy Hunter," a nonfiction history and travel guide, and will follow that with a nonfiction book on Anne Hutchinson, then a historical novel set in England in the 1640s-1660s.